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Joseph, count de Villèle, (born April 14, 1773, Toulouse, Fr.—died March 13, 1854, Toulouse), French conservative politician and prime minister during the reign of Charles X.

Villèle was educated for the navy, made his first voyage in July 1789, and served in the West and East Indies. In 1807 he returned to France after having amassed a considerable fortune during his travels. He was elected mayor of his commune near Toulouse (1808) and mayor of Toulouse (1815) as well as a deputy in the intransigently royalist chamber of 1815–16. From 1813 he was a member of the royalist secret society Les Chevaliers de la Foi (The Knights of the Faith), and he sat on the extreme right with the ultra-royalists. In 1820 he was made a minister without portfolio. He resigned in July 1821, but in the following December, after the fall of the government of the Duc de Richelieu, Villèle returned as minister of finance and soon became the real head of the Cabinet. He was backed at court by intimates of King Louis XVIII, who in 1822 created him comte and made him premier.

Villèle muzzled the opposition by imposing stringent censorship on the press (1822). In 1825, after the stubbornly reactionary Charles X had succeeded to the throne, Villèle’s government provided a long-sought indemnity for the émigrés who had lost their estates in the Revolution, financing it by lowering the rate of interest paid on government bonds. Though the measure was unfair to the bondholders, by satisfying the claims of the émigrés it had the salutary effect of ending the uncertainty over the legal ownership of the lands confiscated during the Revolution. During Villèle’s administration the more conservative Catholic elements had great influence, especially in the universities, from which they purged professors with liberal views. All these policies were highly controversial and divisive, but particularly damaging to Villèle was his disregard, perhaps at the insistence of Charles X, of the widespread sentiment in favour of some sort of constitution. When in the elections of 1827 he failed to obtain a rightist majority, he resigned (January 1828), and Charles replaced him with the vicomte de Martignac, a centrist, in a futile effort to appease public discontent. Villèle took no further part in politics.

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